Being a biblical woman outside the church and home

The Public Square
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@jtbayly, I don’t think the priesthood of believers affects my proposal, because Israel was also called a nation of priests, yet women were not allowed to actually serve as such. But perhaps I’m off base. Perhaps women do perform priestly roles. Certainly my wife intercedes sometimes to me on behalf of our children. Is that not priestly?

Maybe I’m looking at the idea of father-rule through entirely the wrong lens, and I should be listening to @Fr_Bill and thinking not about the role being performed, but whose glory is being served. Then the question would be more along the lines of whether a woman CEO is the glory of her husband, or the glory of herself (the Proverbs 31 woman is the glory of her husband). But that also comes with confounding questions, because what do we make of women who—perhaps through no fault of their own—are not under a man? I’m sure we agree that marriage should be normal, but we’d hesitate to mandate it, right? So then, must we conclude that a woman is either under a husband or a father, or failing that, a surrogate of some kind? I’m open to that, but it seems odd.

@tbbayly, I don’t think I’m following you. Surely it’s just a straight truism that Adam and Eve were a family? And that they were also the government? Adam was a king; a viceroy of God. Can you expand on the error you see me making?

Thanks,
Bnonn

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I suspect it’s at least as priestly as Adam’s work pre-fall. And pre-fall matters for this conversation a lot, as the NT makes clear.

Sure, but the question is what is the fundamental level that we are reasoning from. The point is that those things flow from the lower-level truth that they were male and female. Adam was the father of the race because he was man, not vice versa. So you’re reasoning from consequences, whereas Jesus and Paul appeal back to the original male/female principle when they are dealing with matters of sex. That and the fact that they Paul puts his reasoning onto the fact of headship, order, glory, and the specifics of the fall means that unless we tie what we’re saying to those things, we are missing the fundamentals and ripe for error.

I don’t think there is so much a disagreement per se about what conclusions and applications you’re coming to, but rather the shakiness of the foundation. At least that’s my thinking.

@Fr_Bill, what you’ve written here about glory is helpful, but I’m also seeing a refusal of “our side” (as you put it) to embrace the “head of” language in 1 Cor 11 and the consequences of how the fall went down that Paul appeals to elsewhere. Do you really feel like glory is the primary missing key to the puzzle?

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“That Paul appeals to elsewhere” - you’re thinking of 1 Timothy 2:14?

Even if you’ve got another passage in mind, these two passage 1 Cor. 11: 3 and 1 Timothy 2:14 are - as you note - not embraced by our side. When they come up for exposition, our side almost always (1) slides over them as if they weren’t really there, or (2) turns exegetical and/or expositional cartwheels in order to explain why they do not seem to mean what they obviously require any sane reader to see in Paul’s statements.

Why does this happen?

Well, in 1 Corinthians 11:3, Paul tells us that Christ is the head of every man. And, the woman? Isn’t her head Christ too? Evidently not, as Paul immediately goes on to say that her head is the man. Taken together, these ideas - every man has Christ as his head, while woman has (some) man as her head . . . well, we all know how that idea fares in this fourth-wave feminist climate!

Moving on to 1 Timothy 2:14 - well, dang it! Paul says Eve fell into transgression because she was deceived, and for that reason all women in the church are by Apostolic prohibition constrained from teaching men.

Why that constraint? Is it a punishment? How unfair to penalize all those sisters with the spiritual gift of teaching!

Or does the prohibition look to her being deceived?

Religious feminist: “You’re not saying that women are by nature more deceivable than men, are you?”

Complementarian: "Oh no, no, n!. Paul didn’t mean that!

Religious feminist: "Well, then, why does Paul fault Eve for being deceived? What’s that got to do with anything anyway?

I’ve seen this dialog play out ad nauseum for decades now.

So, yes - our side has some work to do, and that work needs to be different from what complementarians have done since the Seventies (i.e. to retreat, shilly-shally, and so forth). Our side needs expound the NT’s teaching on the nature of the sexes (here’s where an exposition of the glories in 1 Cor 11 is ground zero) and also the relationship between the sexes in marriage, family, church, and society (and there are differences of kind and degree, depending on the stage where the sexes are relating to one another).

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As you point out, most “complementarians” start sounding like Pirky Pig when this objection arises. What’s your response to it?

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Thinking some more on this …

But that also comes with confounding questions, because what do we make of women who—perhaps through no fault of their own—are not under a man?

The issue you raise, of what headship might look like for a single Christian woman, could deal with some teasing out.

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I agree. The pattern of Genesis suggests to me that women should naturally be under the authority of a man. This is actually true of everyone, of course (even Adam was under the authority of the embodied Yahweh in the garden), but for women it seems a more pressing and direct need; they need a personal man, as it were.

This certainly is clear when they are young; a girl becoming a woman needs her father very much. And it also points, I think, to young marriage being the ideal for women. It is much better for everyone if her father has significant input into finding her a husband who can take over his authority and lead her well, and this becomes harder the older she is, and the longer he has had her under his roof.

Perhaps what we can infer from this is that no woman in the prelapsarian world would have found herself lacking a man over her, and that the problem you and I are interested in teasing out is therefore a little-recognized form of evil resulting from the fall. If that’s the case, it does help us to at least know how to approach it in a general sense, because it means we can’t take it as normative or good in order to adjust our other theological commitments in favor of it.

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This is a point which our side needs to emphasize every time someone on the other side rails agianst our supposed determination to put every woman under authority.

Ummm . . . every man is also under authority. Period. Over and out.

Nor is it the case that women can have no authority over others. They have authority over their children, including the male ones, up to a point (what that point is amounts to a different discussion; even past that point the son has a duty to honor his mother, where earlier his honor was chiefly in the form of obedience to her authority).

And, then older wives have an ecclesiastically mediated authority over younger wives, to teach them “… what is good, in order that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands and to love their children, to be self-controlled, pure, busy at home, good, being subject to their own husbands, in order that the word of God may not be slandered.” (Titus 2:3-5) The rarity of this ministry accounts for much spiritual weakness throughout evangelicalism generally today.

At any rate, it’s foolishness to leave unchallenged the religious feminist who charges us with wanting to put every women under a man’s authority. The Scripture puts everyone under a host of authorities (marital, familial, ecclesiastical, governmental), including every man.

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Or often even claiming we want to put every woman under every man.

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I know what we’re trying to do is establish some principles that allow us to make individual applications. And that’s helpful. But so much of femininity and deference and even modesty are contextual, which is what makes them so difficult to teach. The directive/personal continuum from Piper is very helpful. Culture, expertise, and age are major players too, though (in addition to wealth, which has been mentioned). There are cultures where I will always be treated as an authority, based purely on the fact that i am American. That’s cultural. If I am living in a foreign country, I cannot ignore it. I cannot change it. It affects most relationships.

Then, take expertise. In the example given by Fr. Bill, his friend was an expert in her field. She carried authority because of her expertise (and likely because of her age as well?). She was conscientious to guard the relationship as she exercised authority over these men.

Again, take a look at age. When a woman directs a man, she can often do it in a feminine and God-honoring way because of her age and experience. What would be unseemly coming from a woman of 30 can be natural and helpful coming from a woman of 70.

The problem is that our culture suppresses and erases the natural order. We don’t even have the vocabulary to describe the subjective problems. Above, I used the word “unseemly.” No one uses that word except my dad (Pastor Bayly). Other words that were once used to describe it: “impropriety” and “unbecoming.” It’s difficult to describe the problem, but we know it when we see it. It bothers us.

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This question came up recently in Doug’s letters

If a wealthy woman on an estate becomes a widow, does this preclude her from being able to tell the team of male gardeners where to plant the hedge? Of course not.

History is messy, and things like this happen.

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Well, there is “Lydia, the dealer in purple cloth” - meaning that she would have been a wealthy businesswoman, and probably in her own right. Wisdom would say that we can make room for the exceptions that prove (test) the rule, without violating the overall principle. Think of a certain Syrian captain in the temple of Rimmon.

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To quote from above,

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My own conviction is that the need in Reformed churches today is more women being Lydias, Phoebes, and Titus 2 older women. More women who are “mothers in Israel,” bearing the burden of teaching and caring for their mothers, sisters, and daughters in the faith. It’s also my conviction that very few pastors are willing to allow, let alone commend/command (as the Apostle Paul did), these duties among the women of the church.

Hedges? Servants? Oh my.

Reading Calvin on Romans 16:1-2, and Phoebe, is a good shock to our polarized sessions so determined to avoid women taking over the church. Without our wives’ counsel and direction, pastors and elders are blind, deaf, and dumb. Calvin also commends Apollos for humility in being corrected by Priscilla and Aquila, with everyone noting the prominence of Prisca’s name being listed first.

The abuse of a thing does not negate its proper use, and this needs to be remembered particularly with regard to Phoebe, Prisca, Lydia today. There’s much more need in our small group of Christendom called “reformed” today to call women to help in leadership than there is for us to run from it. In fact, it’s my thinking that, had we been using women in leadership of women and children in our churches, and asking them for counsel before and after session meetings, we wouldn’t have as much Keller/Trueman/OPC feminism taking over among us. Love,

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Clark’s chapter on deaconesses is really helpful toward this end.

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In my brief experience, this seems only possible if the husbands of the church permit the Titus 2 women to do this. There seems to be a cancerous worm of thought flowing through some bodies which says “only husband can teach wife, and only wife/mother can teach daughters”, and seems to go further at times to suggest that ANY teaching of wife/daughters must be exclusively done in the home of said patriarch. Seems very hyper, destructive, schismatic, and dangerous to me. Has the effect of cutting off women and children from the love, care, and protection of the church

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…Reading Calvin on Romans 16:1-2, and Phoebe, is a good shock to our polarized sessions so determined to avoid women taking over the church. Without our wives’ counsel and direction, pastors and elders are blind, deaf, and dumb. Calvin also commends Apollos for humility in being corrected by Priscilla and Aquila, with everyone noting the prominence of Prisca’s name being listed first.

Yes, think of it in the terms of every Christian truth being accompanied by two equal and opposite errors. We have been so keen to avoid one error, that we’ve gone full bore in the direction of the other error; that is, not having any leadership input at all from the women in the church. And as you say, this has fuelled a lot of the feminism in the specifically Reformed parts of the church.

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